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Tri Dad

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This is an odd post, but bear with me. Sometime in 2016, my boss was doing Invisalign and it seemed pretty neat, so when my dentist suggested I should see their in-house orthodontist for a free evaluation, I took them up on their offer. The cost of Invisalign was a lot more than I was willing to spend for on my vanity, and even conventional metal braces were a magnitude more expensive than I wanted.

I shelved that project and put it out of my mind until 2018 when I saw an article on Techcrunch for Candid Co., which is essentially a mail order version of Invisalign for prices that were advertised for less than a third of what traditional metal braces cost. I was intrigued and saw that there was a competing service called Smile Direct Club which offered basically the same thing for about the same cost.

Of course, because I went to their site, I started getting bombarded with ads, mostly for SDC. Even at that price, it was more expensive than what I wanted to spend, so I just ignored…

Since my son was born in June, my training regime hasn't been training so much as exercising. The lack of regular sleep makes it really difficult to get in planned sessions, especially of any significant length, so I take what I can get when I can get it. Having a treadmill and bike trainer make that about 1000% easier, but still not perfect.

I've done the Giant Acorn triathlon that past few years but decided to defer this year's entry to next year. I would have completed it, but I'm pretty confident I would have broken my streak of consistent year-over-year improvements since I started tracking my results. One race that I did not defer is my local community's Jingle Dash 5k/10k race (where the 10k course is just doing the 5k course twice). I posted about my 2016 and 2017 results. I went into this race with zero confidence that I would do well. I didn't want to be disappointed so I set no expectations for myself. As I mentioned, I wasn't training, …

Sleep is one of those things, like having a good commute, that you take for granted while you're getting it, but as soon as it goes away, everything is terrible. My son is now almost five months old, and sleep has been a thing.
This post was actually a draft that I made shortly after my son was born in June. It was only one line, so not really even a draft, but it was interesting to see some activity on here since Bub was born. Honestly, this blog, with it's ~30 page views per day, is not exactly at the top of my mind as I wake up at 4am for the day to placate my son to allow my wife to get a few extra hours of sleep (this isn't common, but give me some poetic license here).
Training in general has not been at the top of my mind. I was working out 6-7 days a week, and now I'm having trouble fitting in half that, if I'm lucky. So far this week, I swam on Monday, and walked on my treadmill during a conference call for meetings on two different days (to be fai…

Last year, Nike hosted a big publicity stunt to try to get the first human ever to run 26.2 miles in sub-2 hours. It didn't work, despite all of the advantages given to the runner. I'm sure that one day, somebody out there will break achieve that goal and a 2-hour marathon will be like a 4-minute mile - something extremely difficult to do, but doable.

That 2-hour number is completely arbitrary, but it sounds so good. So good, in fact, that Strava hosted a competition (event? challenge? it's own publicity stunt?) to get people to do a half marathon in under 2-hours. When this event kicked off, I was in the middle of my marathon training plan and I had a 16-mile run planned, which was at a pace that put me sub-2 for the first 13.1 miles of the run. What I soon discovered was that the entire activity, regardless of how much longer it was than 13.1 miles, had to be sub-2 hours. So my 2:02:49 16-mile run did not trigger the Strava badge for me. Obviously the marathon I r…

Wow, it's been a long time since I've been here. I hope my absence has not spurned you web-crawlers that are hopefully indexing this site and bringing it to a larger audience. But, I've been busy! Since the Jingle Dash 10k, I've started up my Hanson's Marathon Training Plan again. This time I am doing the entire plan and I'm not subbing out rides and swims for easy runs. I'm running all of those miles, shoes be damned.

In fact, the plan officially started on 12/6/2017, and since then I've run 92 times for a total of 724.78 miles. The plan has me running six days a week, if you do the math it turns out that I've missed four prescribed runs and failed one run. That's over 92 hours of running to prepare for one race that I have coming up in a week and a half. It's not like I'm going to stop running for the next ten days leading up to my race, but today was my last "SoS" run (something of substance). From here on out it…

Today I ran in the annual Jingle Bell Dash (formerly the Jingle Dash). It's a community event that is a 5k course with two loops for people who want to do a 10k. Typically there only a handful of 10k runners and a (relatively) large number of 5k runners.

I've done this race every year since 2013 and I've come in first place three out of those five times (I was second in 2015 and 18th in 2013. It sounds more impressive than it is. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of my performance. I broke 40 minutes in the 10k for the first time in this race. However, with the field for the 10k only being about 30 deep, it is not exactly elite competition.

This year I went out a little harder than I expected to. This is a tough race for constraining yourself because the course starts downhill and there are a lot of kids that like to go out really fast. But after half a mile there were only two people ahead of me, and a mile after that it was me and one other kid who kept abou…

My wife had the great news to share with my several months ago that one of her good high school friends got engaged to be married and was going to have a bachelorette party. The only problem was that it was an out of town party and it was on the same day as the Giant Acorn triathlon that I had done the past two years. I told her it wouldn't be an issue since I had apparently forgotten to sign up, or at least I couldn't find my registration confirmation for the race, and now that she had plans, I just wouldn't sign up.

On Wednesday I got an email from the event giving me the pre-race logistics. "That's funny," I thought, "Did I actually sign up for this race?" So I searched for myself on the event site and saw that I had a bib number assigned to me. My first reaction was, "How can I get out of doing this race?" I had just started a 10k training plan and had, as a matter of fact, done a my second hard workout of the week; an anti-tape…